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With MacBooks and Ultrabooks shipping with proprietary storage, flash drives like these could become appealing. Price will be an issue, though. If they are as expensive as traditional SSDs, they may not find much of a market. If I were these manufacturers, I'd use slightly slower NAND if necessary to get the price down. Even 200-250MB/s would be "good enough" to use as secondary storage, and would rival SATA II. Reply

The usage of the USB-SATA daughter board allows Muskin to move to other SATA controllers as they become available. Ditto for models that don't need as many NAND packages as they can use a smaller PCB.

I'm also curious if there is a DRAM buffer on the Sandforce PCB (what is the chip next to the Sandforce controller?). There is none, that'd contribute to its relatively low performance to traditional SSD's.Reply

Interesting to see someone finally put a real controller in a USB flash stick! The speeds might be lower than SATA, but geez, just today I'm using a recent quality flash stick and I get like 6MB/s writes, 20-23MB/s reads lol. "Slower" is relative here :-DReply

This is not a innovation, it's existing technology in a smaller package.I'm not here to troll, just stating the obvious.I, myself is not a fan of SandForce due to their history of reliability issues (BSOD and Random Freeze and Lockups).I would rather much use a regular SSD from Samsung or Crucial and put it into a 2.5" USB 3.0 enclosure, you get similar performance or better with a more reliable SSD controller.If 2.5" enclosure is still too big for your pocket, you can always wait for someone to make a msata USB 3.0 enclosure, that would be similar in size to this stick, gives you the choice of what SSD you want to use, give you better performance and reliability.SandForce controllers are just too unreliable compare to Marvell and Samsung, and this stick will face the same issues that other people are facing with SandForce SSD, sure, there's alot of positive reviews, but the negative reviews percentage on SandForce SSD is much higher compare to Crucial and Samsung's SSD.Reply

the sandforce issue is long gone, on top of that you only get BSOD if you running OS off of it. the histories of issues you mentioned doesn't match the usb 3.0 stick here and only SSD, and issues was solved years ago.

on the other hand I'd rather go for sandforce than some samsung shit where they would purposely overclock their phone, and SSDs for benchmark results only and reflect like 2% real performance gain in the real world scenario.Reply